A Declaration from DataBench
November 2025
THE PROMISE
In the beginning, the world wide web was designed as a liberating technology full of hope, creativity and promise. It was built on the back of the original intents of the internet, and for the purposes of this declaration, the 2 terms are one in the same.
Our founding world wide web father Tim Berners-Lee architected it in such a way that no single entity could own or control the internet and powered in such a way that anyone could publish and participate. Their vision was clear: an internet that would empower human potential, enable free expression and connect humanity without barriers or gatekeepers or fear of surveillance or censorship.
It was meant to be open, curious and above all else fundamentally free, and this was not naive idealism. This was deliberate design by them underpinned with architecture itself structured for freedom.
THE BETRAYAL
The original internet has been systematically and methodically betrayed.
For three decades ‘surveillance capitalism’ has transformed the internet from a tool of liberation & freedom into an apparatus of surveillance and extraction. What was designed to empower was re-engineered to exploit. What was built to create freedom became built to capture and control.
Your searches are profiled to predict your behavior.
Your clicks are tracked to manipulate your choices.
Your questions are harvested to train systems that profit from your thoughts.
Your IP is auctioned to the highest bidder without your permission or awareness.
Your experience is claimed as raw material for someone else’s gain.
This is not free creativity or expression.
This is the most comprehensive system for monitoring and modifying human behaviour ever built.
The avoidance cost from this censorship is not merely an economic one, although users now pay on average $287 annually for various disjointed fragmented tools largely designed to act independently, that just don’t work. The deeper cost is psychological and spiritual. Constant surveillance creates digital resignation, where people abandon hope of controlling their digital lives or freedom of expression. It breeds self-censorship where legitimate curiosity is suppressed by fear of judgment. It erodes authenticity, making it impossible to distinguish genuine preferences from algorithmically-shaped desires.
Surveillance capitalism doesn’t just invade privacy. It systematically destroys human autonomy, curiosity, creativity, and agency. It treats human beings as inventory to be processed rather than individuals deserving of dignity. We are now the product.
The world wide web was designed to liberate human potential yet it has become the largest system for human exploitation in history.
THE CHOICE
We face a choice between two internets:
The Surveillance Internet as we know it today – underpinned by surveillance capitalism extracts value from our human experiences. It monitors solely to manipulate and it profiles to predict. It collects to control and success requires treating people merely as products.
The Sovereign Internet – underpinned overwhelmingly by freedom returns agency to individuals. It protects to empower us. It encrypts to liberate and serves us the user, not the algorithm. Success requires respecting human dignity.
These are not simple incremental differences where we could meet in the middle. These are incompatible philosophies built on opposing architectures that will never compromise
You cannot have sovereignty within surveillance capitalism infrastructure. You cannot bolt freedom onto existing extraction architecture. You cannot promise dignity while profiting from violation.
The choice requires rebuilding from first principles.
WHAT SOVEREIGNTY MEANS
Digital sovereignty is not based on standard privacy settings despite us being told otherwise. It is not browser extensions. It is not simple VPN subscriptions and it is not what is being pushed on us as a collection of components masked as sovereignty. It is about having full control over your digital life – your data, your identify, your personal IP, your spirituality, your communications and how you interact online. It’s the idea that you, not government, corporations, or corporations should decide what happens to your digital footprint, and how you should be treated, how you live.
Digital sovereignty is architecture that makes exploitation and surveillance impossible, not just discouraged.
It is both freedom from and freedom to:
Freedom from surveillance. From profiling. From tracking, censorship, surveillance and behavioral manipulation. From having your experience claimed as raw material to be exploited by others – against you. From the constant felling that your digital life is being extracted and monetized.
Freedom to think freely. To explore without fear of censorship or judgment. To create and express yourself without surrendering your intellectual property. Freedom to be curious and maintain the inner life that is necessary for authentic self-determination. To experience the internet as it was meant to be: A tool for human flourishing.
True sovereignty delivers both.
It means privacy by default because your communications and online activity are protected from surveillance.
It means you control your data; you decide who can access your personal information, how it’s used and importantly where it’s stored. Most importantly you can revoke access at any time.
It means you control your identity because it’s not across centralised platforms, the system cannot access it, even if it wanted to. Your identity stays private because the architecture requires no accounts, no emails, no correlation.
It means your thoughts remain yours because processing happens on your device, not in corporate clouds.
It means your experience is optimized for your benefit because the business model aligns with your agency, not against it.
Sovereignty is not a feature you configure. It is a foundation you build upon.
WHAT WE'RE BUILDING
MAX is the first Sovereign Digital Environment – completing what our founder started.
Not privacy Band-Aids or incremental fragmented, disjointed improvements for separate fee’s. A renaissance of how the internet was meant to be.
Zero-knowledge by design. Personal device tokens replace traditional accounts and passwords. No personal information required and no correlation possible.
Performance without compromise. 4% technical overhead versus 20-30% for traditional approaches. Freedom at full speed. Create the agency to block monitoring overreach into your devices and private lives.
Local intelligence. AI that works for you and with you on your device, with your intellectual property remaining yours.
Unified sovereignty. One integrated device based architecture eliminating the gaps and conflicts of fragmented tools.
We will never provide a backdoor and not only because we won’t, but also because we can’t. The architecture prevents it.
This is not so much about trusting us. This is more about removing the need for reliance on us to handle your most private and personal information by creating an environment that can’t be accessed. This is the whole point, create an environment where no-one can see you whilst you retain your internet freedom.
WHY THIS MATTERS
The internet shapes how we think, learn, create and connect and it’s architecture determines what kind of beings we have become and possibly contributes to who we are yet to become.
An internet built on surveillance creates surveilled subjects. People who self-censor also suppress their curiosity and creativity. These are people who indirectly perform for algorithms instead of living authentically and who abandon hope of controlling their own identities and data.
An internet built on personal sovereignty creates sovereign individuals. People who think freely and explore without fear. Who maintain the inner life necessary for authentic self-determination and freedoms.
Importantly this is not a technical problem but more so this is a philosophical crisis with technical solutions. We are not just simply fighting for privacy but more so fighting for human dignity, liberty, freedom and agency in the modern digital age.
We believe the internet should feel like empowerment and freedom, not surveillance, censorship and control.
We believe human experience should not be claimed as raw material for corporate profit. Humans must stop being the product.
We believe your thoughts, questions and creativity are personal IP and belong to you, not to cloud services.
We believe freedom is not a premium feature but a fundamental right.
We believe business models can align with human dignity instead of opposing it.
We believe technology should serve users, not surveil them.
We believe the www can be what it was meant to be.
THE MOVEMENT
This is not about just one company; this is about restoring the internet to its founding promise and to achieve this we need courage and commitment across many areas to join forces.
We need engineers who will build sovereignty into architecture and not continue to bolt it on as features. We need designers who focus on human agency, not engagement metrics. We need entrepreneurs who will prove and trust that respecting digital agency and dignity ultimately creates better a better fabric of our society and businesses rather than exploiting it.
We need investors who understand that the most valuable companies should serve human flourishing, not human harvesting.
We need communities and users who will demand liberation and refuse to simply submit to exploitation as inevitable.
We need regulators who will recognize digital dignity as a human right, not a luxury feature and enforce severe financial penalties, not just notices.
The transformation from surveillance to sovereignty will not be easy and will be blocked on multiple fronts as trillion-dollar business models are built on extraction and exploitation. Platform monopolies depend on data harvesting and advertising empires require behavioral profiling.
We are more than agitators; we are investing and are at the forefront of this transformation.
THE INVITATION
If you believe the internet’s founding promise matters.
If you believe personal online freedoms should not be sacrificed for convenience.
If you believe surveillance capitalism should be reversed.
If you believe another internet and fabric of society is possible.
Join us.
Use sovereign tools and demand your freedom.
Support companies that respect your dignity and abandon platforms that exploit you.
Advocate for regulations that recognize your digital rights and oppose policies that normalize surveillance.
Tell others why digital freedom and sovereignty matters and show them what liberation feels like.
The internet and www we get is the internet and www we accept.
This is the Sovereign Digital Environment, and we’re building it.
DataBench
Restoring the World Wide Web’s Founding Promise
www.databench.com.au
www.maxpi.io